switching to skaters in the alter-reality

alter-reality update tonight at midnight.

i'm certain that my computer is working again. i've worked my way back to where i was when i left off, and am playing with options on the 8th track for inriclaimed. it's passing an a/b with a full reset of the eq settings, but not passing an a/b with more subtle changes. and, i'm feeling the bass is not defined enough on either, so i'm essentially remixing it. i should have some uploads before the next sleep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9L98As4DjE

aha!

if you go to device manager, right click on the driver, select properties, and then select the properties tab there is an option to disable the mixer for each device. this appears to have stopped all windows fuckery and given me a clean stream through directsound. it has the strange effect of no longer launching sndvol32, and claiming i have no audio devices installed when i launch mmsys.cpl. but, that's a minor annoyance if it's giving me a clean stream. and, it's actually also uninstalled the wdm device from the device manager altogether.

i've got it set up to play through asio now, and i don't see any value in disabling it. but, it's useful to have the reference of checking to see what it sounds like through a clean directsound out.

i vaguely recall doing this, and vaguely recalling undoing it to access the midi out on the soundblaster. it's the only thing i've done so far that seems to actually turn off the windows interference.

the closer it gets, the further it remains...

but, i've found a workaround. the problem is now solved. i will be cleaning up this morning and back at it tomorrow, after groceries.

i've been operating under the assumption that there's a solution. the truth is that i can't state with any certainty that all of it ever sounded right through foobar at the same time. i was always mixing through cubase. there were always subtle differences. when i get one track to sound better through the kmixer, another sounds worse.

it kind of struck me this morning that even if i can get an ideal answer, it's not worth any more time - because this is just a playback issue. playback is very important, of course, for sequencing - and for what i'm doing right now. but, i've kind of spun myself around in a hole - i'm fixing the playback to get on to the task at hand, but it's only the task at hand because it was broken in the first place.

so, what i've done instead is upgrade foobar so that i can use the asio plugin. playback is now over asio, completely bypassing the kmixer and any resampling it was doing.

again: it's not that the results were terrible across the board. i kept saying it felt like i was close, but it was just not quite right. some of the tracks were sounding absolutely perfectly - others were sounding flat. fixing the buffer size, or unlocking the sampling rate on the device, or 100 other things would fix one song and break another. and, so i just can't be certain there is an across the board answer. and am really leaning to the idea that there isn't. that is, if i want the tracks to sound as they were mixed, i may have to switch buffer sizes mid-record, or some other crazy thing. i may be partly at fault for not standardizing things, but as i mentioned in the last post, it shouldn't be happening anyways; i think i'm trying to create something that never existed, and am exposing the flows in the windows sound architecture in the process.

moving to asio just throws the whole problem out the window. i get everything i want. it's technically superior, even. and, i can move on.

i can state for certain that i did move buffer sizes around from song to song on playback through foobar, because i had to to get the sound right. given that truth, i probably shouldn't have expected a stable set-up in the first place. that is, the culmination of the last year of work has created a playback mess over that system.

but it's done now...

i'm almost certain it's good to go. the last thing had to do with setting the buffer sizes, and this isn't supposed to make any difference on playback, but it definitely does. i can't really explain it, but it seems to be the last piece.

when you hear the term "streaming audio", it gives the impression of audio flowing from start to finish with no interference. that's what the language is meant to invoke. but, it's a digital process, so of course it's not true. rather, there's a continual process of small amounts of data moving into buffers, and the buffers moving forward like a conveyor belt. the buffer size is how big those chunks of data are, measured in samples or seconds or bytes. this is user configurable for largely historical reasons.

the conventional wisdom is that this shouldn't matter because it's just a determination of how big the copy operation is. it's broadly seen as a largely legacy issue, mostly to do with processor speed. older processors had to take larger buffers because they couldn't work as fast. what that would create is choppy playback, rather than differences in tone, because it was struggling to process fast enough to put the stream together in real time. but, modern processors don't have that problem, so it's supposed to be that it doesn't really matter.

but, that's not happening. i'm noticing that i need to get the buffer size to a certain minimum point in order to maintain tonal integrity, which is sort of weird. sometimes it's the bass that sounds a little thin, other times it's the higher parts - but mostly sustained parts. it's almost more like it's a reverb issue. and, this is known in some sense. if you put a reverb plugin on an out, then the reverb calculation will be different if it takes the stream in in small chunks than it will be if it takes it in in large chunks - because it's reverberating over different lengths. but, that only makes sense on playback if windows is interfering somewhere along the way.

in fact, i have noticed this previously, so reducing the issue back to an issue i've dealt with on a functioning system indicates i'm back in functional territory.

i need to eat. but, i think i'm very close.

this is also from before, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here:

this isn't just bowie's best record, it's one of the decade's best records. that little comeback stint in the 90s was his most interesting period, musically. but, will we ever hear it in it's initial and intended form?

(relevant file: schizoid, confused, on sexual confusion in adolescence)

obligatory influential post.
 

the last thing i need to point to for this feature is socal punk. my entry point was ultimately nirvana, but the real entry point was the offspring. i probably wouldn't agree much with gurewitz if we were to order his catalog; the offspring and bad religion are really the only two pop punk bands i'd bother with, because they have that higher level of harmonic complexity. and, coming out of the grunge collapse, it was increasingly socal punk that i turned to for my rock kicks. as a guitarist, the guitar style in those offspring and bad religion records up to about 97 had a big effect on me that you can hear for years afterwards in the fast, dissonant chord work - and often in more subtle ways, as well. and, if you've been reading my rambling, this should not surprise you, either.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, to spin inside dull aberrations, anything with a guitar, really)

this is a post from about a year ago, and i won't post it there again, but i'll post it here again:

this more or less replaced fixed as my go-to nin record for busing and had a big influence on me in terms of rhythms slowly developing over time. it's something that mostly comes out in the remixes, this sort of evolving, mutating thing...it's very much process music....

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, symphonies 4 & 5, teenage jesus (suicide), others)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i often describe what i was doing in this period as synth pop, and tend to point to a lot of industrial influences, but there's also a large gaze component coming from bands like curve, garbage, mbv, the cure and (ultimately) the smashing pumpkins. it's just that it's a lot more subtle and kind of buried in the production. it's the flange on the guitar, the gate on the snare. for this particular feature track, though, you can really hear it - i'm just pulling this curve track out of a hat, though. this is a strong disc, but a lot of this music is very stylistically similar and i could point to virtually any of it as influential in the context i'm constructing it in.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, virtually anything after 1998)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

it's sampled. in a sarcastic song about necrophilia. hey spidey, what are you doing out all night by yourself, anyways?

(relevant track: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

the prodigy kind of hit be my surprise in 1997. i don't know if the kids realize it, but 1997 was the year that techno really broke. there was that huge daft punk record. the chemical brothers. and, the fat of the land.

i was veering in this direction, but i was following more of an underground path, through offshoots of 80s industrial, which i'd been set on by a mild obsession with a couple of nine inch nails remix discs released before 1996, and a beginning exploration of the warp records catalog. research was largely done over the internet, and through conversations with people 5-10 years older than i was. i was aware of the raver kids around me, but i didn't really understand what they were. my intuition was that a rave was really just another kind of high school dance, and my punk instincts put me squarely against it as a consequence of it. looking back, i regret keeping an arm's distance from it - in hindsight, i understand that this was a very wrong perspective and that the truth is that if i was looking for punks in the mid to late 90s then the place i'd be most likely to find them at was actually a rave. i never really came face-to-face with the prodigy until they were roaring at me over muchmusic.

this isn't a record i've come back to much over the years. the fact that i was exploring much more abstract types of electronic music should say a little bit about where my head was always really at in relation to the genre, and what i'm really looking for; even jilted doesn't really hold up well, despite it's importance. but, the fact that something comparable to what i was searching out over usenet was coming at me from mainstream media was exciting to me for a little while, and it coerced me into biting into this disc pretty hard, for a little while. you can hear little bits of it all over the discography.

(relevant tracks: on sexual awkwardness in adolescence, evil is a human construction, subtle nods elsewhere)

obligatory "influential on the featured track" post.

i came at the aphex twin from a different angle. i do wonder if he's ever bothered to listen to a nine inch nails record, all these years later. but, reznor was a hell of a gateway to a fifteen year old in the mid 90s, and the aphex twin wasn't the first thing i delved into - it actually came at me via a roundabout way, through the skinny puppy side project called download, which is what really branched me out into the warp sound. i was initially more attracted to the more chaotic reaches of industrial music - i was a punk. and, as a "rock fan", i largely self-segregated myself from music in the electronic sphere. so, it took several years of easing into it before i could handle listening to "techno music". these mental shackles did of course eventually lift themselves, and i am certainly better off for it.

anybody coming from a multidisciplinary background and claiming rdj as an influence is going to be expected to point mostly to the breakbeats, and there's a few in there, but he was actually just as much of a compositional influence for me, as i moved on. i think we share a big influence from coil in that respect - although he's got about ten years on me. but, the orchestrated soft synths coming from rdj are what really defines him differently, and something i've made various attempts to emulate.

(relevant tracks: on sexual confusion in adolescence, clarity, the time machine, untitled; pretty much everything from 1998 on)

i've pointed out here a few times that my soundcards have been behaving poorly, and that i've isolated it, only to realize i hadn't.

i'm not sure what happened near the end of june, but it seems to have undone things in a way that i wasn't fully aware of. i'm running a very stripped down version of xp on my recording pc that cuts a large amount of the operating system out. in the process of trying to fix the problem, i seem to have put in place problems related to the windows xp sound mixer, which is known to be not very good for audio processing due to the way that it interferes with audio streaming. i think my initial script had broken the kmixer, and i had reinstalled it in an attempt to fix the problem, which created a whole other slew of problems.

i think i've fixed it in a two step process:

1) lock all sample rate conversion in the drivers.
2) delete the streaming drivers (mskssrv, mspclock, mspqm), which seem to be involved in conversion.

my initial script had deleted the streaming drivers, but not locked the sample rate. the result was that if i deleted the streaming drivers, i'd end up with fading because something was moving back and forth in the drivers. but, if i left the drivers in place, i'd get bad results from the windows conversion process.

locking the audio drivers without deleting the streaming drivers resulted in the files playing at the wrong speed, which seems to have been a consequence of an incomplete conversion process. but deleting the streaming drivers with the audio drivers locked in place seems to have resolved the issue.

i'm still testing, but i think i've got it figured out.

in the meantime, the alter-reality has caught up with me, and is now entering the synth-pop phase of my musical career (which was all of 1998 and early 1999). the catalyst was a four-track recorded that i got for christmas at the end of 1997. it's january 8th in the alter-reality; my first completed, uploaded track is dated to january 9th and will be featured tonight at midnight.

the featured tracks will now begin to change more frequently, which means i'll be posting more influences. there will not be any more lengthy pauses in this process for several years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0&t=15m50s

shifting to period 1.2 in the alter-reality

i ended up losing yesterday after all in a haze of election ramblings. it's another six weeks still. but i'm going to do some listening this evening, and think i'll quick lose myself back in it as soon as i'm sure it's actually fixed.

the alter-reality updates tonight at midnight, which is the long awaited movement directly into the synth pop phase. the updates will be more frequent moving forwards, as the lull over late 97 has come to an end.

i made a decision last year to upload pieces from this period in larger segments, so the updates are going to be a little strange, with tracks moving in and out until the period closes a little over a year from now. this video has the first six songs from the first demo, but i'm really drawing attention to fourth track, which starts at 15:50.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ-_rMcOPD0

i've been kind of moping around the last few days, wanting to keep my distance and my mind elsewhere, but i came back to it last thing tonight and i think i've finally got it.

locking the sample rate ended up consistently playing the files too quickly through wdm - a clock issue. again - sort of, maybe. so, i broke it again. and, this time, it seems to have come out ideally.

i've noticed that the streaming device is not reappearing. that suggests to me that it's part of the sample rate conversion. this may be the combination i had previous stumbled upon which broke the kmixer in the right way: it both locks the rate on the device and uninstalls the conversion driver, leading to a straight stream. or so it seems...

i have a little more testing to do, but it's a big shot of hope. best it's sounded in some time. i will get right to this in the morning, as i've got my focus and drive back.

well, this is hilarious - setting it to "headphones" seems to have made a rather dramatic difference.

i....think...i..

i can't remember.

that's some hope. i'll try it again when i wake up. i think it's another step to it, anyways.

not ants, but water

hi.

i've been checking for ants periodically, and it seems to be ok for right now. but i've noticed that some of the drywall in that enclave is rotting. it's over in the corner, pretty much directly underneath where the water from the air conditioner is constantly falling off the porch. i haven't touched it, but it's pretty obvious from looking at it that if i were to touch it, it would cave right in.

now, i don't know for sure that the reason the drywall is rotting through is water from the air conditioner. it's been humid, then cold, then humid, then cold, then humid. but, it *is* directly under where the water is coming down.

and, i don't know how substantial a problem it is - i just don't know.

but, i thought i should let you know that it appears to be rotting and that a good guess is that the water is dripping into there.

j

yeah, no, it's gotta be that fucking sample conversion - even on seven. because now that i've played it through bandcamp, it sounds better through youtube and locally through foobar. fuck. it's set up right. there has to be a way to stop it.

i'm going to see what happens if i just completely disable the entire wdm architecture and force it to play through directsound. will that even work?

i am so remarkably discouraged right now. literally nothing sounds right, and i don't have the slightest understanding as to why.

i have five years, now.

i'm considering putting it down for a few weeks and focusing on some reading, instead. the closest i can get to a decent sound is through bandcamp, which is a streaming mp3 at 128kbps. everything else through every other combination is completely wrong.

i dunno. like, if somebody wants me to give up on this, they might be disappointed at what i do instead. it's not going to be more productive. it's going to be writing essays of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature and posting them to a website nobody reads.

yeah. i think i got it.

the sound architecture in xp is much maligned. it's one of those examples of microsoft taking too much control over something that ought to have minimal operating system interference. they never *really* fixed this, but it changed a lot in vista.

i've known this the whole time but it was never really a problem before, so why would it be a problem now? well, i may have changed a few settings at some time in the past and forgotten...

the kmixer seeks to resample everything, in ways that often make little sense. it seems like the people that designed it didn't really know a lot about audio, they just figured that upsampling everything to the highest formats possible would be a best practice strategy across the board. that's not true, for reasons i won't get into.

both the m-audio and the alesis come with lock settings that prevent any modification of the sample rate from outside sources. locking the devices to 44.1 had a big effect on the wdm driver outs for both devices, presumably because it's stopping any sample rate conversion. an a/b with the asio outs through cubase actually suggest that this minor fix creates an inaudible difference through wdm and a larger difference through directsound. before i locked them, it was directsound that clearly sounded better. so, this is a big difference.

i want to draw attention to this, though. because i had both outs to 44.1. why would windows upsample a stream when the source and hardware are set to the same value? that is entirely absurd. and, who would think you need to lock the rate in place to prevent the operating system from interfering? it's utter madness, truly.

but, i think this is at least a partial fix. i'll need to do more testing over night to determine if it's fully fixed or only half fixed. but, the difference is quite positive and quite obvious, so i think this is the solution to the bulk of the problem.

the problem was less fixing the problem once i figured out what it was and more trying to figure out what it was.

and, the reason the soundblaster stayed stable was because 44.1 was the max - which was also the reason that switching from the soundblaster to the m-audio fixed the m-audio [it went back to 44.1, until it was re-opened].

what i'm leaning towards with the sound issue is that the windows kmixer is resampling and the directsound isn't; that is, that by playing through directsound, i'm avoiding resampling. so, i'm going to play with some things to see if i can try and lock it in at 44.1.

the m-audio and alesis can both stream at over 200K. but i don't want windows doing conversions on the fly, dithering, etc.